Seems like physical Bitcoins a la https://www.casascius.com/ would be a good match for your situation. I don't know how many people are running around with them - perhaps it would be an interesting business to buy a bunch of them and sell them for USD along with a booklet explaining BTC for freedom-minded people who have not yet been introduced to BTC.

Thanks for the answers. Buying casascius coins sounds like a nice idea, but I don't have a lot of cash to invest in that kind of thing. I'll talk to the festival organizers about it though, cheers for the idea.

I forgot to mention: the festival is in Europe, in Romania to be more precise. SMS would do the job. I have found only one SMS-to-Bitcoin wallet application that would work here, on the http://blockchain.info/ site. I'll look into how safe it is.

I'm assuming some people will have Android phones, in that case wouldn't it be a good idea to also print a QR code off this site http://qr.ma.eatgold.com/index.php and use that?

If you have SMS coverage then you should have GPRS data service. That should be enough bandwidth for light clients like Bitcoin Spinner. But you should check with Jan on the Spinner thread.

The second option is if you trust the customers not to attempt a double spend attack, you can accept transactions without any confirmations. So the merchant will have a laptop with a recent copy of the blockchain, a wifi router used as a LAN, but without it connected to the internet.This will allow you to receive payments from other users on the LAN, but not receive confirmations from miners.

If i had to do a transaction in the woods... well The problem with that is you can't check the balance so the point of failure here is that there could be no BTCs in it for you if you traded products or services and BTC on the spot. If you trust the person you are dealing with and believe you are confident with trusting this failure with this person, then I would probably put Bitcoins on new Bitcoinaddress in divisions of 5BTC per address, print out the private keys and bring them with me and then purchase something for 5 BTC by handing the other party with one private key containing 5 BTC. (Maybe bring along a few 1 BTC and 0.5 BTC address too?). Thats the best idea i have.

Hmm we could also have some BTC company start a Bitcoin Paper money thing and some how incorporate it so there is an offline way to check if a piece of paper is valid....Users would download an app that could scan QR codes and verify that the piece of paper is valid some how offline. wait idk if that would work

Hmm we could also have some BTC company start a Bitcoin Paper money thing and some how incorporate it so there is an offline way to check if a piece of paper is valid....Users would download an app that could scan QR codes and verify that the piece of paper is valid some how offline. wait idk if that would work

Hmm we could also have some BTC company start a Bitcoin Paper money thing and some how incorporate it so there is an offline way to check if a piece of paper is valid....Users would download an app that could scan QR codes and verify that the piece of paper is valid some how offline. wait idk if that would work